An Islamist mob has captured and paraded Catholic nuns in Cairo as prisoners of war after six hours looting church school and replacing cross with banner resembling Al Qaeda flag, according to reports.

“A mob marched nuns through the battle-torn streets of Cairo ‘like prisoners of war’ in the latest outrage against Egypt’s Christian minority,” reports UK’s Daily Mail this morning.

“Sister Manal, principal of a Franciscan school in suburban Cairo, watched for six hours as a mob looted the building, knocked the cross off the gate and replaced it with a black banner resembling the flag of Al Qaeda,” according to the paper. “The classrooms were then burned to the ground and the women taken away, attracting a crowd of abusive onlookers. Police told Sister Manal that the nuns had been targeted by hardline Islamists, convinced that they had given Muslim children an inappropriate education.”

Daily Mail quotes Sister Manal as saying: “We are nuns. We rely on God and the angels to protect us. At the end, they paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking us.”

Siblings Wardah and Bedour, two Christian women employed by the school, also found themselves having to fight their way through the mob while being groped, hit and insulted by the extremists, reports Daily Mail.

“So far two Christians have been killed since the military-backed government moved against protesters calling for former president Mohamed Morsi’s reinstatement,” says the paper. “And dozens of churches, homes and businesses owned by Christians have been attacked and razed to the ground.”

Christians, according to the report, have long suffered from discrimination and violence in Egypt, where they make up 10 per cent of the population of 90 million.

•Photo courtesy Daily Mail shows an Egyptian army officer raises his gun at the crowd outside a mosque in Cairo. Elsewhere nuns were paraded like “prisoners of war” after Franciscan School attacked by Islamists.